


Me Time

by maximum_overboner



Category: Villainous (Cartoon)
Genre: Character Study, Dark Comedy, M/M, black hat is gleefully evil, black hat's softer side is just as terrible as his harder side, deeply unhealthy dynamic, flug isn't doing so well, i call it... gleevil, reciprocated feelings but... it's complex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-22
Updated: 2017-06-22
Packaged: 2018-11-17 04:44:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,549
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11268198
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maximum_overboner/pseuds/maximum_overboner
Summary: If you open a door you should be ready for what you encounter behind it. Flug is not.





	Me Time

**Author's Note:**

> i'm having a lot of fun with these! i love exploring unhealthy dynamics :>

 

Flug threw himself down the myriad hallways, unable to make heads or tails of where he was, pursued by a woman that somehow did. He heard her skittering on the ceiling behind him, lithe and sharp, growing in volume, her taunts ringing out. She had become bored and she was as capricious as she was cruel, more than content to slap and pester him while he just wanted to work. She had, unfortunately, had her nails done, and Flug didn’t want to deal with that. Panicking, he veered sharply to the left, launching himself into the door, opening it with his momentum, scrambling up and locking it shut. He turned around to find that he had leapt from the frying pan and into a forest fire.

“Flug.”

“Oh. Oh, um, hello, sir.”

Black Hat was sat in a bubble bath, chewing on a lit cigar and wearing a dark shower cap. He looked comfortable, entombed in bubbles with a single rubber duck, his slender torso visible over the top like a periscope. They looked at one another. Black Hat needed a moment to process the monumental error on Flug’s part, but once it hit it hit hard. So abrupt that it didn’t occur to him to raise his voice.

“Flug… I’m clearly occupied. Get out.”

“Right. Good idea.”

He didn’t leave. He stayed there, his back pressed to the door, weighing up his options.

“That wasn’t a suggestion. It’s seven, on a Saturday. This is me-time. It’s in your contract.”

“I-Is it? Every time I try reading it I get nose bleeds and pass out.”

“Try harder. ‘Me-time’, not ‘you-time’, I need a break from shepherding you flock of morons. You have five seconds before I get out of the bath. You do not want me to get out the bath, Flug. It took a lot of superheating to get the water to the perfect temperature.”

“I--”

“Four.”

“U-Um--”

“One.”

“You skipped a few seconds!”

“I know. You work better with deadlines.”

Flug panicked, hoping his recent ‘exemplary’ work had let him slither into his Black Hat’s good graces, just enough for a favour.

“Dementia is outside,” he admitted, steepling his fingers.

Black Hat looked at him with contempt, backed with something else, then threw his hands up with a splish and a loud scoff.

“Ugh, you’ve caught me at my softest. If I weren’t in this bubble bath I would be screaming at you. Fine, stay. Go look at the corner for a while.”

“Please, please let me-- wait, what.”

“You heard me. It’s Dementia. Even I’m capable of _some_ empathy.”

Flug was stunned. Black Hat scraped his nails against the ceramic bath in frustration, pointing him towards the corner.

“Now, Flug!”

“-- Right, of course, sorry, thank you boss--”

“Shut up!”

“-- Will do, shutting up, stopping the mouth words--”

Flug faced the corner, as instructed. The steam in the air made his bag damp and his hands clammy, and turning his back to Black Hat did not help. He heard the water lap gently as Black Hat reclined, and the sound of smoking. Then, unusually, conversation.

“So. How are you.”

Flug remained stock still, unsure of how to deal with small talk even at the best of times.

“Um… You know, I’m ok. You haven’t let me eat anything since yesterday and Dementia tried to strangle me.”

“She does that. What is it people like to eat again. Bread?”

“I mean… Sometimes.”

“Go get some bread after you leave. Can’t have you starving to death. You’ll reek.”

“Thank you, sir.”

Another awkward silence. They hadn’t really interacted outside of work hours, outside of threats and scary faces. Black Hat sighed. As much as he enjoyed threatening the weak, his back was killing him. He was too tired to go all out. 

“Sit down somewhere. Or something. I don’t care.”

Flug turned around, slowly. He found that Black Hat was still in the tub, not ready to pounce on him with sharp teeth as he had feared.

“Go on.”

Flug placed the lid of the toilet seat down and sat on that.

“Thank you.”

“Don’t mention it.”

“Alright.”

“Maybe mention it a little.”

Flug suppressed a sigh. He danced around certain words, a ‘kind’ would get him thrown out on his bony arse.

“I-I appreciate this.”  

Black Hat chuckled. A soothing bubble bath, a nice, stolen cigar, and talk about how great he was. He considered dragging Flug in every time he was in the tub, he enjoyed a good grovelling session or two. Flug, tempering his fear, let his shoulders slacken. Black Hat was more than capable of pointed, gleeful cruelty, but he didn’t seem to want to indulge in it right now. He had eased off over the past few weeks, actually, after the big success. This inspired mixed emotions in Flug. The joy of reprieve, and the nausea of thinking on what he had done.

He wouldn’t be getting a peace prize after that debacle. The thought of it made him want to cry again. But he couldn’t start crying, not in front of Black Hat, his eyes would glaze over and he would scamper over to lick his eye sockets and Flug was never quite sure what to do when that happened. He occupied himself by looking around. At the towels, the tiles, the candles. At Black Hat. Naked.

Flug was a scientist, first and foremost. His curiosity got the best of him. He leaned forward, subtly, enough to let him look over the rim, his eyes drifted south to find-- _oh good God!_

Black Hat clicked his fingers.

“Flug. Flug, up here. Flug.”

Flug couldn’t avert his eyes, as much as he wanted to, but he had the sense to speak.

“Oh God, I’m so sorry--”

“Now isn’t the time, Flug. Stop staring at my penis.”

Flug dropped all pretense and gawked.

_“That’s what that is?”_

“Of course. You’re a doctor. You should know.”

“I don’t know what I’m looking at, b-but that isn’t something people have.”

“Yes they do, shut up, and don’t change the subject, I was about to say something heartfelt.”

Flug blinked. This broke him out of his stupor. Black Hat looked embarrassed, but powered through.

“I… I was thinking of increasing your share in the company. Promoting you.”

Flug didn’t know what to say, his brain defaulted to the obvious.

“Th-There’s only four of us, and the other two don’t actually work--”

“I know that,” Black Hat barked, “I know, it’s the gesture you idiot! The gesture! I’ll… Actually pay you. A wage.”   

“Enough to live on?”

“Don’t push your luck.”

Flug was prepared for horrors, for shouting, for Dementia’s sharp, painted nails, but he would never be prepared for this. It wasn’t kindness, but it ran parallel to it. This was Black Hat at his softest. It felt strange.

“I’m supposed to throw in ‘positive reinforcement’, so… Here’s some of whatever that is. Do you feel positively reinforced?”

No.

“Y-Yes.”

“Good.”

Black Hat took his cap off to scratch his head, and Flug’s vision dimmed to nothing as always. When the cap was back on, his vision cleared. Black Hat was casual, tapping the cigar ash over the side of the tub and thinking.

“I could almost envy you,” he said.

“Really?”

“Yes. Not your brains, looks, charisma, sexual prowess, demeanor--”

“I get the point.”

“But the fact you have principles to go back on. I just do what I want, that’s expected of me, but you, you’re doing something evil despite having the capacity for a sickening amount of benevolence. I’m very impressed.”

Flug felt his throat tighten. It wasn’t flattering to be complimented on your servitude. He clenched his fists, grit his teeth under the bag. His self control had been rock solid, but he felt like he was about to crack. Something slipped out.

“I’m nothing like you,” he said, “I’m not.”

“No, no. You’re far worse. You’ve bought into the outdated ideas of ‘morality’ enough to hate what I do, but then you do it anyway. You can complain as much as you want, what you think and what you do are two very different things, Flug.”

Black Hat puffed on his cigar, mulling.

“I could _think_ about people dying in agony, and that wouldn’t do anything. But luckily I have you to do it for me.”

He laughed, quite lightly, and was met with stony silence. One of the candles crackled, the wick popping.

“Oh, lighten up. You never laugh.”

“I am different from you,” Flug insisted, “I am.”

“In body, sure. You’re stuck with what you have, you can’t do the fun stuff.”

To prove his point he wiggled his eyebrows and popped his own eyes with the teeth now protruding from his eyes sockets, pushing the slurry around with wiggling tendrils, like tongues, then crunching the hollow caverns shut until the teeth scraped and snapped. With a blink he was back to normal, hand holding up his cheek. Flug didn’t flinch.

“Gotten used to it, then?”

“Yes,” Flug admitted, hating what it made of him.

“I didn’t think that could happen. You’re not as weak willed as I thought, I did that at a dinner party and everyone starting breaking their bones and eating each other. Wasn’t even my dinner party.”

“The Hors D'Oeuvre Massacre.”

“Someone looked me up before they started here, I see.”

“Did they ever put all the fires out?”

“No.”

Flug grew emboldened, his boss seemed willing to entertain his questions for once without snarling back.

“Why do you do the things you do?”

“Why do you like planes so much?”

“That’s different; it’s a hobby.”

Black Hat smoked his cigar, rolling it on his tongue and letting his shoulders sink into the water until his feet were propped up on the other end of the tub. He sighed, popping the bones of his shoulders.

“It’s not different at all.”

Flug grew bolder still, the unusualness of his circumstances bringing repressed, bitter rants to the top like foam, consuming and muddling his thoughts.

“The gun I built didn’t work as intended. I didn’t mean for it to do what it did.”

“I’m sure the families of all the people we’ve killed will care about that. I don’t care about what it was meant to do; I think it was still very successful.”

The gun.

It was meant to give people you disliked indigestion, an idea Black Hat had let pass but didn’t like very much. When it was sold, however, it was revealed that the burning sensation felt in the stomach wasn’t indigestion but the beginnings of the human body turning itself inside out, anus first, into an infinitely repeating moist donut of suffering that could do nothing but scream, wiggle and die. It was as sudden as it was messy and hilarious. There were riots in the streets, demand spiked and possession of one was considered a war crime. Black Hat had congratulated Flug, gifted him five bottles of champagne and gave him the week off to celebrate his monumental success. Flug didn’t sleep at all during that week, choosing to drink out of the bottles and marinade in sorrow. He had tried to make it as non lethal as possible, as with all his inventions, but had accidentally created gun that shot a terrible, terrible death. Black Hat would tear out articles in the newspaper, more than happy to have someone to share in his joy with. Not the credit, however. Flug didn’t mind, this time.

The pictures. God, the pictures. Like electrified mincemeat. Steak in a turbine. Kidney confetti. He held his head in his hands.

Black Hat looked embarrassed again. It didn’t suit him. It was tinged with dark affection.

“But in any case, I’m...”

He looked like he was going to choke to death. Flug hoped he did, bitterly. And yet, despite all this, he yearned for the praise. It was fulfilling. It was something he had never known, even with his accolades. Filling the gaps in himself with something pustulant. It wasn’t love, but it ran parallel to it.

“Even with all your flaws, I’m… I’m very proud of you. I think I should loosen the leash. Give you more free reign. You’ve went above and beyond, this time.”

“What if I betray you?”

Black Hat smirked.

“Oh. Oh, you won’t. We both know you won’t. But that was very cute. Admirable.”     

Black Hat stood in front of him, totally naked except for his cap, and yet Flug was the one who felt undressed. Black Hat marched towards the door, lacking in shame, and by the time he had reached it his clothes had punctured his skin and worked outwards until he was fully dressed; suit, hat and shoes. Black Hat placed his hand on Flug’s shoulder.

“Brace yourself.”

Flug softened at the concern. Black Hat’s expression hardened into a scowl, as if he were putting a curtain up.

“I have a plan to deal with her. Get your shoes wet.”

“Pardon?”

“Do it.”

Flug did, walking over a wet patch on the tile, taking care not to fall over.

“She’ll make a beeline for me. You go out in front. If we get lucky she’ll slip on a puddle of water,” Black Hat said, “fall backwards and break her neck. Then I can eat her and we can forget all about this nonsense.”

“I don’t think that will work.”

“You’re right, you’re right. It’s not enough. When she latches onto you to throw you aside; piss yourself.”

Flug sputtered.

“No!”

“Don’t be selfish. A bit of piss. Just enough for her to slip and break her neck. Hose her down afterwards; I’ll still eat her.”  

“For God’s sakes sir, no!”

“What kind of employee can’t piss on command.”

“This one!”

Black Hat rolled his eyes, his softer side receding like the tide to make way for the jagged rocks.

“Fine! Get given a promotion and this is how you behave, fine-- we’ll just have to run. The old fashioned way. She’s like a gazelle.”

He shuddered.

“At least if you shoot a gazelle it doesn’t stand back up and beg for more. I tasered her four times yesterday; she can’t take a hint. On the count of three. One--”

Black Hat swung the door open, pushed Flug in one direction and sprinted in the other. In a blur of colour, Dementia vaulted Flug's prone form and tacked Black Hat to the ground, who was flailing like a salmon.

“The piss! _The piss, Flug!”_

Flug felt a pang of sadism. He wished that she would stop, but also that she would go mad and tear out Black Hat’s throat, all at once. He suppressed what it made him. These thoughts were becoming increasingly common. The bitter tang of spite, coppery and moreish. Easy to grow used to, easier still to obtain.

As loathe as he was to admit it, Flug could see the appeal in _being_ Black Hat. Rancorous, selfish and wild, with something softer underneath. It didn’t make him gentler, kinder, this softness. It was to contrast. It was the well hidden pus in the scab. Deep, bubbling, but very much there.

Flug was a scientist, first and foremost.  

He wanted to poke at him and see what seeped out.


End file.
